Wai Chee Dimock

Who is Wai Chee Dimock?

Wai Chee Dimock has written on every period of American literature, from Anne Bradstreet to Star Trek. She is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. Originally from Hong Kong, she received her B.A. from Harvard and Ph.D. from Yale. She argues for a broad conception of American literature, including materials both high and low, and scales both local and global. Her work has appeared in publications ranging from Critical Inquiry to Los Angeles Review of Books to Salon.

Three concepts are important to Dimock: deep time; kinship among genres and media; and close reading. She is a frequent public speaker in the US and abroad.

Dimock's lecture course, "Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald," is available through Open Yale Courses.

Many of Dimock's projects are collaborations: with Michael Gilmore at Brandeis University, on Rethinking Class; Priscilla Wald at Duke University, on Literature and Science, a special issue of American Literature; Lawrence Buell at Harvard University, on Shades of the Planet; and Bruce Robbins at Columbia University, on a special issue of PMLA, Remapping Genre. See also an exchange between Dimock and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,Narrative 14.